Should we buy a projector or big monitor for meetup/workshop presentations

We're organising our first Drupal meetup and have a practical question.

A lot of our presentations will be tutorial/training focused, with demonstrations of websites, walking through Drupal configuration steps, and code walkthroughs.

We need a projector/screen display method that's good enough for everyone in our workspace to see (20 - 25 people). There's no point in doing code walkthroughs if the people at the back of the room can't actually read the code that is being talked about, because the resolution is too low and the code isn't legible.

Does anyone here have experience with doing live configuration and code walkthroughs in a presentation, and if yes, what resolution/specs do you think we need on our projector in order to get a good result?

I've already got an opinion from someone, but as we could be spending a lot of money on this, I'd like to double check by socialising the problem with the community. Any help would be much appreciated.

Comments

A 50 inch-ish screen would be too small for 20-35 people. Resolution is important, but since you are going to want good-sized type, it is not as important as brightness.Get all the brightness you can afford.

For a small group in a room where you can control the lighting, you won't need an all powerful top level projector. On the other hand if you're looking to invest for long term thinking and bigger events, then yes, get the best you can afford.

Given you are starting out though... I'd ask around local friends and colleagues and see if you can borrow a projector. You can always rent a more powerful one when needed later.

Depending on where you are, there might be a local council, library, or business association who might lend you one.

Anyway - congratulations on kickstarting your first meetup! Don't forget to add it to the events here and get the word out on twitter and facebook too!

Thanks for the advice, I'm now strongly leaning towards borrowing one for the first meeting to get a baseline understanding of what specs mean in practice, and then using that experience to make the correct purchase decision for the second meeting and beyond. Our event is scheduled for September 14. We'll be starting to get the word out next week. Thanks for your help!

For reference, we held the event today using an Epson EB-S11 at the conference room we rented running at 2600 lumens and 1024x768 resolution. The resolution wasn't ideal - because we had to mirror our screen and the projector, it made demonstrating on a low res screen a little awkward, but it was good enough.